What value does a user-generated folksonomy offer in comparison with a taxonomy designed by information professionals?

What is a Folksonomy?
Informal tags created by communities of users of such sites as Flickr and Delicious to enable content searching. Created by the user for the user.

Advantages

serendipitous browsing

constantly evolving

chaos through democracy

flexible

accuracy not so important

used for ‘fast moving’ content within a constantly evolving social media NOT for managing high value content where reuse and access are critical

BUT

poor precision and accuracy (although in certain sites where content is so great such as Flickr this might not be such a problem)

no checking

lacks structure of a thesauri

no controlled vocabulary

poor browsing facility

However, as Lemieux points out integration of Taxonomy and Folksonomy is possible.

– some control is required but the two can co-exist. For example, Ann Arbour public library where patrons can tag, leave reviews and star-rate an item which has also been catalogued by a traditional taxonomy